On Aug 17, 1:30 pm, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > > But they are not all consciousness = awareness-of-awareness. And the > decision to act precedes the awareness of the decision - which is > evidence against the idea the consciousness is in control of one's > decisions, c.f. Grey Walter carousel experiment. Even in common > experience one makes many decisions without being aware of them, even > decisions that require perception.
But it is still you making the decisions. If you are driving a car, 'you' are 'aware' of driving the car and 'you' decide how to drive it. If you are asleep, you would not be conscious and not be driving the car. If you find that you have been daydreaming while driving, you are experiencing being aware of other awarenesses - imagining dinner, murdering your neighbors, etc, while your driving has been pushed down further on the awareness stack. You are still passively aware that you are in fact in a car and driving, just as you are passively aware of where you were born and how much money is in your wallet, but you are not actively aware of that awareness. It's nothing like a computer which will either have something in memory or not, in storage or not. You may not know if you remember something until you try, and what you think you remember may change over time. So awareness as it pertains to milliseconds disqualifies consciousness as awareness of awareness, because that is a much larger participation of entities and it takes longer. What you see as the earliest neuron spikes are the initiation of that impulse, but it takes a while for all of the emotional, cognitive, and motor skills to join in. The process as a whole however is one single event from the first person perspective. There is no early neuron spike without the total event. The problem is that you are describing a 1p event in 3p terms, so that time is a Newtonian t. But that is a not a the level at which human sensorimotive awareness occurs. It's like trying to watch a tv show by putting your eyeball right up against the TV screen. >So it is not plausible that > consciousness makes the decisions. Whatever you call what is making the decisions, it is your proprietary sensorimotive awareness and not generic probabilistic electromagnetism. Decisions are semantic and meaningful, whether they are fully in the front of one's active awareness, or in the 'back of one's mind'. This is the important distinction. The alternative is absurd. It means that you have no choice but to read this, and that what it says makes no difference to your neurology, so therefore there is no point in reading anything. You're just a puppet of random genetic permutations who has the accidental misfortune of thinking that it is alive. It's just silly. It makes transubstantiation seem scientific in comparison. > Consciousness may indeed occur in > parallel and sometimes correlate with decisions and sometimes not. But > the correlation is due to a common, subconscious, cause. Sure. Your high level verbal 'consciousness' is not necessarily able to push it's will down the spinal cord. There's all kinds of protocols. You have to be in the mood to do something, you can't always talk yourself into it. > > Not like an assembly line - like a living, flowing interaction amongst > > multiple layers of external relations and internal perceptions, the > > parts and the wholes. Without perception and relativity, there are > > only parts. > > >> The rest of the above paragraph seems to be an > >> attempt to save dualism by saying why the casual spirit comes after the > >> motor effect. I have no problem being alive and conscious with > >> consciousness coming after the decision. The decision was still made by > >> me. I just don't conceive "me" as being so small as my consciousness. > > > You're applying a broad definition of consciousness at the beginning > > and a narrow definition to consciousness at the end and using the > > mismatch to beg the question. > > I didn't refer to "consciousness" at the beginning. I said what happens > first is the activity of neurons - not necessarily conscious. You are > attributing inconsistencies to me to create a strawman. At the end I'm > using your definition of consciousness "awareness of awareness". Sorry, not intentionally. I was just rushing. It still seems inconsistent in how you are using consciousness, sometimes as awareness of awareness (verbal let's say) and sometimes as decision maker (not necessarily verbal but instinctual, habitual, whatever...not asleep or comatose). > > I have no problem with recognition > > coming after cognition after awareness after detection, but I have a > > problem with conflating all of those as 'consciousness' and then > > making a special case for electromagnetic activity in the brain not > > corresponding to anything experiential out of anthropomorphic > > superstition. Just because 'you' don't think you feel anything doesn't > > mean that what you actually are doesn't detect it as a first person > > experience. > > >>>>> If moving my arm is like reading a book, I can't tell you what the > >>>>> book is about until I actually have read it, but I still am initiating > >>>>> the reading of the book, and not the book forcing me to read it. > > >>>> Another non-analogy. Is this sentence making you think of a dragon? > > >>> A dragon? No. Why would it? Why is it 'another' non-analogy? Is this > >>> 'another' ad hominem non-argument? > > >> It's a non-analogy because no one proposed that your actions were > >> determined by a book or other external effect. The hypothesis was that > >> they are determined by neural processes of which you are not aware. > > > They are determined by neural experienced of which you, at the .1Hz > > level of 'Brent' sitting in a neurologist's office are not aware. That > > doesn't mean that the groups of neurons at the 0.001 Hz level are not > > aware, and it doesn't mean that that awareness is not part of your > > total self's awareness. > > Now you've introduced another concept "total self's awareness" of which > you are not aware. Logic requires the consistent use of words. And it > did nothing to explain your analogy of the book that didn't force you to > read it. Consciousness-awareness-feeling-sensation-detection is not a monolith. Even within each PRIF there are multiple sensorimotive entities and relationships. Trying to flatten it into a single word and then compare it to it's microcosmic electromagnetic shadow just muddies the waters. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. 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